Yet many of the 475 Palestinian and Israeli peace builders from different backgrounds, locations and degrees of religious observance that we have interviewed over the years believe that the structural and ideological divides that separate Israelis and Palestinians are still - although perhaps barely - bridgeable, and that we have not exhausted all of our non-violent options.

You see, when it comes down to horsetrading and building coalitions for specific policies, this is where the conservatives here and someone like you can sit and and figure out where we stand on the different issues and see what accomodations we can make and where are differences are not bridgeable.

They seek to bridge a divide that is sometimes bridgeable and sometimes not, between arguments based solely upon public reason and arguments that rely for their acceptance upon specifically religious beliefs and views.

The source of the uproar, the by-now familiar quotation from a medieval dialogue between a Christian emperor and a Muslim intellectual, was not meant to be a voice for the pope's own views on Islam's "inhumanity," but to illustrate the fact that even seemingly irreconcilable positions on faith are bridgeable by human reason, the very bedrock of faith itself.